NHILE - Far Away From Here

From a meeting between two young guys from Turin, driven by a spontaneous passion for music, comes Nhile, an artistic project that with surprising confidence explores territory rarely tread in the landscape of Italy's many small self-produced releases.

The ingredients skillfully blended by Massimo Ordazzo and Paolo Della Rocca across the mere thirty minutes of their debut “Far Away From Here” include an unmistakably dark streak and clear fascination with ethereal melodies, often crowned by piano, recalling the more delicate passages of Sigur Rós and a fundamentally ambient-romantic approach. But that's not all, since on top of this there's a measured use of electronics and a translation of that shared dark undercurrent into spectral settings, alternately heightened or compressed by the pianistic melodies, the muffled calm of the vocals and the rhythmic element, which in “Drama” even takes on the shape of an obsessive electro pulse.

But that's just an isolated case in a work that, starting from the crystalline piano of the brief intro “From Here…”, unfolds through songs that are little more than whispered, in which a brooding romanticism plays at merging with calm, dreamy expanses, carried discreetly by warm, never invasive electronics, culminating explicitly in the hazy ambient modulations of the final two tracks.

While operating in a context where the line between sonic fluidity and expressive flatness is a thin one, Massimo and Paolo easily manage to avoid the latter, through pronounced harmonic structures and compositional frameworks that are simple but never banal. Telling examples of this are the interplay of synthetic melodies and more static passages in “Not In This World” and the sense of ceaseless transformation that radiates from “Shining Eyes” and the splendid “Memories”, tracks whose sinister atmospheres are filtered through an approach not unlike that of the most nocturnal, spectral Piano Magic.

Of course, there's still plenty of room for improvement in the writing and production; but faced with a release that's little more than a homemade effort, rather than nitpicking over that touch of eighties redundancy or the not-always-flawless English pronunciation, it's only fair to offer sincere appreciation for this Turin duo's debut and encourage their growth, with the hope that it might catch the attention of a label able to provide the care and exposure that the freshness of their work deserves.

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07/02/2009